1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character recognition apparatus and, more particularly, to a character recognition apparatus for recognizing each of characters in a character series or character string which may contain a narrow character-spacing or contact portion, a noise image portion or a chipped portion.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional method of character recognition includes a pattern matching method. According to this method, a binary-coded character image is matched against dictionary patterns prepared in advance to recognize the character image. Thus, an accurate registration of each character to be recognized with dictionary patterns must be performed.
With a character string narrow in character spacing, however, even if a labeling process or a profiling process is employed, an accurate registration of each character with dictionary patterns will be difficult because of narrow or contact between characters, contact between a character and a noise image or a chipped portion in a character image which may occur in a binary coding process for characters.
A problem with the conventional character recognition method is the difficulty of an accurate registration of each character with dictionary patterns due to contact between binary character images, contact between a character and a noise image or a chip in a binary image in the image of a character string with narrow character spacing, thereby failing to obtain good results of recognition.